Scoring the World: A Systems-Thinking Approach to Sonic Branding and Design

rs [ron sadoff]:

Good morning, I'm Ron Sadoff, and I'm delighted to welcome you to our fifteenth annual Music and the Moving Image Conference at New York University. It's a great pleasure for me to introduce Joel Beckerman, who is an award-winning television composer and founder of Man Made Music,¹ a global sonic-branding studio. He's also author of The Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Feel, Think, and Buy.² He and his team have developed signature sonic identity systems and logos for a variety of brands and organizations from AT&T,³ IMAX,⁴ and Hulu⁵ to the Alzheimer's Association,⁶ the Nissan Leaf,⁷ and the podcast network Wondery.⁸ He's also very influential among composers and a real citizen for a world-wide cache of composers that compose for media. He's the cofounder of the Society of Composers and Lyricists in New York. He serves on the board of ASCAP, one of the two major performing-rights organizations, and he's the founder of Your Music, Your Future, an educational campaign to warn young composers of the pitfalls of accepting total buyouts for film, television, and streaming platforms. I'm delighted to have been a friend of Joel's for a number of years now. Joel, welcome.

Figure 1.

Joel Beckerman

[Plays Audiovisual Example #1: Montage of logos and commercials from https://www.manmademusic.com/work/super-bowl-on-nbc:

NFL9	(00:07:42)
IMAX	(00:07:54)
HBO10	(00:08:14)
ESPN FILMS11	(00:08:21)
AT&T	(00:08:33)
HULU	(00:08:48)
PARAMOUNT12	(00:08:51)
NBC NIGHTLY NEWS13	(00:08:56)
SOUTHWEST.COM14	(00:09:02)]

jb [joel beckerman]:

So, all examples of sonic branding, but before you really can understand the power of sonic branding and really what it can do for us, and really what composers, sound designers, and music supervisors can do with this technology, you need to sort of pull back and look at the human part of the equation. Whether or not we realize it, every moment of our lives is scored by music and sound. It's this hidden actor that changes our mood in an instant, guides our choices, and makes or breaks emotional connections we have with people, places, or things. Like a film score, music and sound, off the screen, guides all of our experiences, moment-to-moment—again, both on and off the screen—and this soundtrack emblazons specific memories in our brains, memories that can be retriggered in an instant.

[Plays Audiovisual Example #2: Star Wars¹⁵ theme, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D0ZQPqeJkk (00:10:08)]

jb:

Thank you, Maestro Williams.¹⁶ Based in part on these observations and others, I co-wrote a book with Tyler Gray called The Sonic Boom, which details the concept of what I call "sonic humanism," which is using music and sound to make people's lives richer and simpler. This has many applications, and we're going to talk about at least some of them today, from designing product sounds to specialized soundtracks to benefit pedestrian safety in the age of electric cars to entertainment and media, even scoring experiences in health and wellness with measurable results. It also provides a new window into what is known in product marketing as sonic branding, which is in itself a hot topic. Not all sonic branding is created equal, though, and we're going to talk about that.

When done right, sonic branding utilizes these same principles of sonic humanism to create "ownable" brand "themes," which can be the musical and sonic foundation for a full sonic identity system that propagates throughout the entire ecosystem of a brand or an organization.

This approach is only effective when a systems thinking is brought to the creation of the music and sound foundation of the work. Now, as film composers or television composers, there's a certain amount of systems thinking we...